Help prevent sexual abuse of children in India

The year 2020-21 was, in all aspects, challenging yet a great learning experience. Exactly a year ago, the COVID 19 pandemic disrupted the world, bringing everything to a screeching halt. As the months passed by, we moved through this disruption quickly and positively; exploring opportunities amidst difficulties, rolling the dice, revolutionizing and transforming, challenging our own convictions, as we walked into the unknown. Even during the pandemic we continued our work and were able to impact the lives of over 183,260 adults and children; experiencing a growth of 57%. To support individuals and communities during the COVID 19 pandemic we distributed 6,219 packed grocery kits through our school and NGO partners. Here's a quick overview of the year that went by. 

Personal Safety Education

Personal Safety Education Programme (PSE) is a life skill-based module that empowers children with the knowledge and skills needed to participate in their own safety. Our PSE programme also empowers key adult stakeholders in the child's life, like parents, caregivers and teachers, to create a safe environment for children to thrive in. In the face of the pandemic, the biggest challenge that lay in front of us was how do we reach out to children, especially when the schools remain closed?

We battled this with the help of our external stakeholders and school partners who made it possible for us to connect with children and parents through their online classes. Our forward thinking on building our digital repository was one of the main enablers to achieve this feat. With digital tools and renewed confidence we reached out to 9,128 children, 2,622 Parents, 671 Teachers, and 106 Non-Teaching Staff. In addition, we created awareness about Child Sexual Abuse and Personal Safety Education programmes among 986 adults.

Psychotherapeutic intervention has been an integral part of the Personal Safety Education Programme, wherein, children who disclose sexual abuse are referred to Arpan's in-house counsellors for psychotherapy. Last year, we provided counselling services to 582 children through 1,456 individual sessions and 2 group sessions.

Training and Advocacy

Arpan has always focused on capacity building for child protection through training and capacity building initiatives to replicate and scale Arpan's model of prevention and intervention and advocate for robust child protection mechanisms to address the gaps both at the policy level as well as curriculum and interventions on the ground. Similar to our other programmes, this was a year of significant change for Training and Advocacy.

At the beginning of the lockdown, we hoped that things would be controlled and we would be able to conduct in-person training sessions with our partners across the nation.  But weeks into the pandemic, as things began to unfold, we realised that the new normal is here to stay for a while and we pivoted the delivery of the programme to the online mode. We created customized online awareness session modules for different stakeholders, suiting their time commitment and requirement.

We experienced the immense possibilities of going digital when we trained 1,31,331 participants online through 38 organisations and 4 volunteers. Through these training sessions, we could reach 18 States and Union Territories of India. Through our awareness sessions, we have been able to reach out to 7,069 participants through 80 organisations.

Digital Learning

Our Digital Learning programme empowers children with the knowledge and skills to keep themselves safe in unsafe situations and seek help. It also educates the various stakeholders in a child's life about Personal Safety and creates awareness about Child Sexual Abuse prevention and intervention. We started our digital journey three years ago, and it proved to be a real boon, especially during the times of the pandemic.

This year, we developed the Online Personal Safety Course for 8-10-year-olds in Marathi and 11-13-year-olds in 3 languages - English Hindi and Marathi. Owing to the pandemic, we couldn't shoot live action videos. And hence, to cater to the urgent needs of our various programmes, we decided to think out of the box and created innovative animated videos that are fun and engaging.

We also crossed the borders and worked with our international partners from Guatemala and the Philippines to make Arpan's My Safety Book, a flipbook to teach children personal safety, available to children, globally. Our Personal Safety Course and adult resources have also been published on Ministry of Human Resource Development's Online Learning portal 'DIKSHA'. Through our digital learning resources we were able to reach 34,714 individuals.

Mental Health Services

Arpan offers counselling and psychotherapeutic services to individual clients or groups of clients and at the community level. This year, we broadened our mental health services to offer COVID related mental health support to individuals facing anxiety, stress, grief, etc. due to the uncertainty of the current pandemic. We also explored the digital space to provide counselling and therapeutic services online. We were able to reach 561 people through WhatsApp support groups and 676 individuals through our email-based therapeutic programme. 109 clients were emotionally stabilized through calls & chats and 124 clients were provided long term therapy through 864 individual sessions and 8 group sessions.

Public Awareness

It's been a really busy year for the Public Engagement team at Arpan. We conducted and participated in a host of online and offline activities to create awareness and sensitise people on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse. But given the pandemic situation, we realised the need to rethink our digital strategy and align ourselves with the accelerating shift towards digital content consumption. By putting our systems in place, we could adapt to the new normal. We conducted 20 webinars including our flagship "Talk the Talk" series for public awareness with an outreach of about 3,800 individuals last year. We focused on key partnerships to enable scale; and through our activities like live sessions on social media, Press Releases, website traffic, social media posts, etc. garnered a reach of over 17 million of which over 13 million was from our flagship event, Child Safety week.

Although we had planned a variety of on-ground events for Child Safety Week 2020, the pandemic compelled us to execute the campaign completely online. Child Safety Week 2020 was about online conversations on Child Sexual Abuse to engage the digital audience, create awareness and dispel misconceptions about the nuanced issue of Child Sexual Abuse. What enabled us to achieve a massive reach of 13 million was the ItCanWeCan Campaign, a series of 7 videos on various topics related to Child Sexual Abuse; informative Webinars; a Tweet Relay; and Influencer Participation and partnerships across countries. All of this wouldn't have been possible without our movement builders like Neerja Birla, Vidya Balan, Lillete Dubey, Faye D'Souza and many more who helped us to create awareness and encouraged people to take action for preventing it.

Resource Development has been an integral part of all our programmes. This year, we published the story based Personal Safety Education Training Kit for Grade 1-10. We also launched a booklet 'Answers to Questions You Cannot Ask Otherwise' for adolescents to help them find answers to some of the most difficult or embarrassing question that they cannot normally ask others.

We also engaged in two research studies this year. The key finding from one of the study - 'A comparative study to assess retention across different delivery and intervention models of Personal Safety Education', was that the implementation of comprehensive model showed better retention of concepts among the younger children, while in the higher grades, online PSE implementation and abridged model seemed to have better retention.

The year 2020-21 may have definitely been challenging; but more than that, it has been a year of new discoveries and great learnings. We look forward to this New Financial Year with hope and renewed confidence to continue working towards our vision of "A World Free from Child Sexual Abuse".